1. Technical Field
This disclosure relates to a heating cooker for use on household dining table, countertop, sink, etc., or in business-use kitchen, etc., the heating cooker having a top plate on which a cooking container to be heated is placed. In particular, this disclosure relates to a heating cooker that heats the cooking container to be heated by a heater element disposed under the top plate, to perform cooking, the top plate having thereon a display indicative of the state of heating.
2. Related Art
Among this type of heating cookers, an IH cooker using an induction heating system for heating is becoming a recent mainstream and is popular in terms of its high safety and easy care. This by no means intends to limit the heating system of the present invention to the induction heating. The top plate used in this heating cooker is of a substantially flat shape with excellent design and improved care.
This type of heating cooker, however, embraces a program that the state of heating is hard to recognize, unlike the gas-operated cooker, etc., and therefore performs a display through various schemes using light-emitting elements such as LEDs or a liquid crystal display such as LCD arranged under the operation part or top plate.
Particularly, the top plate arranged on the upper side of the heating cooker is required to be one of excellent design having both light-blocking properties and light-transmitting properties so that the internal structures cannot be seen through during the non-heating but so as to transmit light of the display device displaying the state of heating by use of the light-emitting elements such as LEDs during the heating.
For example, a certain type of top plate for cooker arranged at the upper portion of the cooker is made up of a transparent glass layer, a pearl-like layer arranged on the undersurface of the glass layer, and a light-blocking layer arranged on the undersurface of the pearl-like layer, and is configured to have a viewing window without light-blocking layer above the light source disposed in the cooker as shown in Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication No. 2003-86337 referred as Patent Document 1. The above description uses unchangedly the names of parts used in Patent Document 1.
FIG. 10 is a sectional view of a top plate placed at the upper portion of the cooker described in Patent Document 1. FIG. 11 is a top view of the top plate placed at the upper portion of the cooker described in Patent Document 1.